"You cannot exaggerate about the Marines. They are convinced to the point of arrogance, that they are the most ferocious fighters on earth - and the amusing thing about it is that they are."- Father Kevin Keaney, Chaplain, Korean War

"You cannot exaggerate about the Marines. They are convinced to the point of arrogance, that they are the most ferocious fighters on earth - and the amusing thing about it is that they are."- Father Kevin Keaney, Chaplain, Korean War

Oh heck yeah, wow, that was I think the first real big server I ever played on.

Stephen

Logged

"You cannot exaggerate about the Marines. They are convinced to the point of arrogance, that they are the most ferocious fighters on earth - and the amusing thing about it is that they are."- Father Kevin Keaney, Chaplain, Korean War

Oh heck yeah, wow, that was I think the first real big server I ever played on.

Stephen

It was first big server anyone played on, until it blew up in our faces. I can still remember Chaotic Illusion and I defending the ISC homeword from those nasty, sneaky Feds who flew around to the back of our lines hoping to catch us off guard. The map was so big that it took about 15 clicks of the button to scan all the way across it and about 30 mins just to fly to the edge of your own space. Ahhh, the memories!

Ok well lets's start with ArticFire. As Corbo says there has been nothing like it since or before. Before Artics most servers were small Iplay style (official servers were Iplay East and West). In those days there were hundreds of players but the tech was not up to snuff. Most played on 386s or the new fangled Pentiums and ran well Win95 or 98. We connected if we were lucky with a 28.8 baud modem and broadband and cable only available to very very few. The low tech was the root cause of most of the problems. Artic (who was in Alaska and its not a mis spelling that's how he spelt Artic). Artic ran it on a Pentium but it ran so hot he blew up 3 special cooler fans. He worked in the day so if the server went down we had to wait hours for it to come back up, no remote rebooting by third parties. The most I saw online was around 150 and one of the complaints was the amount of time you had to queue to get on, but as it was so unstable everybody got dumped off with monotonous regularity.

Why was it so different. well it was BIG, I mean REALLY BIG like space is supposed to be. Unfortunately the flatfile DB in the game was not up to it and that ultimately killed it.

Until it died it was the most absorbing campaign I have ever played. Everybody was 100% into it and role play on the boards was the norm not the exception. We had diplomacy and spying and war and everything in between. The Rommies attacked the Feds but blamed it on rogue players, the Klinks berated the Rommies in public but in private it was all a plan and so the subterfuge and gamesmanship went on and on.